


In A Single Moment

by dragonshost



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Gen, deals with last ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:07:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23365927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonshost/pseuds/dragonshost
Summary: Deep into Last Ages, Ultear saw what waited for her.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	In A Single Moment

Pained footstep after pained footstep, the old woman made her way back to town. The cane helped ease some of the agony brought on with each step but it couldn't completely alleviate it. Pinpricks of fire spread engulfed her feet, steadily climbing up her legs. It had been a foolish idea to deliver the letter herself, she knew that, but...the thought of them never knowing...

It was unbearable.

Meredy always wondering if she'd just abandoned her, like she had once believed her own mother had. Jellal thinking that she'd run away from her duty. In a way, she'd done both really. When she had chosen to cast Last Ages, full well knowing the cost.

And she also couldn't stand the thought of someone else giving them the news. It had to come from her. She had made the choice, and so the letter was hers to deliver. Her final duty and burden.

It wouldn't be much longer before this aging body gave out completely. Soon she would fade away completely, the spell finally eking out the last dregs of her life and time from her body. Her legs, it seemed, had a head start on the rest of her.

Terrifying as the situation should have been, she felt oddly calm about it. Becoming nothing, even her soul consumed in the spell, was almost... freeing. Or maybe it was because... she knew what was waiting for her.

Not a happy ending, of course. She didn't deserve that, and she didn't expect it. Not after everything that she'd done. All the people that she had hurt.

_Meredy._

_Gray._

_Jellal._

But the place she would be going wasn't a hell, either. No. She had only caught the barest of glimpses, but it was no hell.

Deep into Last Ages, she'd hung suspended for a mere moment, caught between Earthland and-

Stars. Droplets of light on a pitch black canvas. Bursting and reforming, revolving and flaring out in whirlpools of light. Galaxies, and black holes, icy comet tails and clouds of floating rock. Spreading endlessly outward, and Ultear bending towards each as time flowed like water around the heaviest and brushed against the lighter.

A lifetime spent in a single moment, and then plunged back into the fire and debris and screams of Crocus. Her body rapidly aging. A fluke that she had even survived it at all, her mind scrambling and the reality that her time, all that time, had amounted to only a single minute given for everyone else.

She returned to a body that wouldn't last, and stardust in her veins.

And to that selfsame stardust she would soon return. Her consciousness so spread out that it couldn't even be called one anymore. Never again would she meet her mother at the shore. Instead, she would become a part of the shore, and everything else.

No, it was not a hell.

But maybe, at long last...

It would be Ultear's peace.


End file.
